Adam Names a Sparrow

In which my sister's friends grow tired of labels, India is partitioned, Aristotle conquers the world, a madman relieves the siege of Fort Stanwix, John Dee is cuckolded in pursuit of Adamic language, a sparrow is named, and I try to explain why I have some culpable sympathy for postmodernism 

The Pleasure of Naming

"There are two kinds of people". 

Don't you love it when a sentence starts this way? I love it when a sentence starts this way. I feel butterflies with warm honeyed wings fluttering in my belly and sticking to my ribs, because something new is to be given a name; and since Adam dubbed the animals, humans have exulted in the pleasure of the name. When I hear the murder of fourteen year old girls my little sister brings to flood the floors and rattle the rafters of our house—when I hear them all complaining: "Why do people have so many labels? does everybody have to have a label? can't I just be me?"—I want to shake them by the shoulders and scream: "YES! Yes it's good that things have labels, labels are wonderful, I love it when things have labels! How can you spurn the pleasure of the name!?" 

The Italian novelist and semiotician Umberto Eco framed it beautifully in his famous meditation on signs and sacraments—(being also a translation of an obscure 14th century manuscript of uncertain provenance and a magnificently engaging murder mystery)—The Name of the Rose. Midway through the tale, the young monastic chronicler, Adso of Melk, entangles himself in a hopeless, wordless, nameless moonlight tryst with a peasant girl and is irretrievably infatuated. A few chapters later, the girl is seized and condemned as a witch by a visiting inquisitor; she is already "burnt flesh". But even this terrible knowledge, this wordless awfulness, is not the ultimate unbearable for poor Adso; no, the ultimate unbearable is that she will forever be "the girl", and not "the name":

"I burst shamefully into sobs and fled to my cell, where all through the night I chewed my pallet and moaned helplessly, for I was not even allowed—as they did in the romances of chivalry I had read with my companions at Melk—to lament and call out the beloved's name. This was the only earthly love of my life, and I could not, then or ever after, call that love by name." 

To be a human being is to call things by their name. This is not just a piece of poesy or cosmogony, it is a fundamental feature of our cognitive architecture. Before the 1970s, people born deaf were widely considered to be mentally impaired; they seemed to lack some of the fundamental features of cognitive maturity: memory, conceptualisation, abstraction—even self-awareness. In point of fact, they were perfectly normal. All they lacked was the power of the name. People who are born deaf, and only learn sign language later in life, have trouble remembering the time before they learned to sign—a time when they lacked inner speech. Without the tools to spin their sensations into a story, they could not yoke those pre-linguistic memories and times to the chariot of self—the agent of personal continuity—because the self is a story we tell to ourselves, and it requires that we know our name. As Helen Keller, who was born both deaf and blind, wrote in her memoirs:

“Before my teacher came to me, I did not know that I am. I lived in a world that was a no-world. I cannot hope to describe adequately that unconscious, yet conscious time of nothingness.... Since I had no power of thought, I did not compare one mental state with another.”

If there is to be light, then God must speak. And the world is not complete until the soil brings forth a creature who can call things by their name.  

The Trouble With Names

But I'm really not being fair to my sister's friends am I? In my eagerness to hymn the delights of denotation, I've left out something crucial, because the pleasure of the name is in the power of naming, and the power of naming is not a harmless thing—it is a very dangerous thing indeed. My sister's friends are right to be fearful of labels and suspicious of names. Next year they start high school, and nothing will ensure four years of hell with greater certainty than a freshman collision with a damning "that", as in: "Oh—she's that girl." 

Maybe that is a label ("Slut" comes to mind).

Maybe that is a nickname ("Pringle-Panties" comes to mind).

Maybe that is a story (You already have a high-school memory filling in the blanks here).

But whatever that is, you don't want it. The name imprisons as easily as it liberates. 

Perhaps this can account for a curious feature of the second half of the 20th century: people began to grow suspicious of the power of the name. Civil Rights, Feminism, the youth movements of the late sixties and early seventies, all of them were predicated—in one way or another—on escaping the shackles of a name. The common thread in all these eruptions was this: "I am not a Black, I am not a woman, I am not a wife, I am a person, I am me—and me is incommensurable with all that came before it and all that will come after it." 

In Europe, a family of philosophies growing out of existentialism, phenomenology and anti-colonialism came to be known as postmodernism. Why? Because it was based on a wholesale rejection of the characteristic ambition of modernity: The provision of a necessary and sufficient account of the whole of reality—a map of the universe that exhausted its territory—a perfect and crystalline order of explanation in which every thing would be given its proper name and only that name. Postmodernism is thus most frequently defined in reactionary terms, as "incredulity toward meta-narratives". 

Postmodernism is founded on the assumption that no map will ever be sufficient to its territory. Whether this implies that maps can have no relation with their territories whatsoever—(the common charge of those who try to reject postmodernism wholesale)—or simply that the necessary inadequacy of mapping itself means we will best explore the territory by inviting as many people as possible to draw as many maps as possible—(much closer to the actual position of most people who would describe themselves as postmodernists)—is peripheral to the point I want to explore here.

The point I want to explore here is this: Why are names so dangerous? And why did the modern West in particular come to experience them as so imprisoning?

Why Are Names So Dangerous?


"There are two kinds of people: Greeks, and everyone else who wish they was Greek." 

Cute right? It's a quote from the family patriarch in My Big Fat Greek Wedding. But it's also a great way of analysing why names are so dangerous. The first step in the analysis is to recognise that names arrive with rules, and these rules are very strict. It is the inflexible necessity of these rules that gives the name its dangerous power. There are three of these rules, and they were first articulated by Aristotle, though we've all been following them since the Palaeolithic. My quotes are from Aristotle's Metaphysics.

Law One: The Law of Identity

This is the first, the most simple, and the most important law—the other two are merely corollaries. The law of identity states simply that once a thing has its name, this thing is the same with itself and different from another. 

"For it is impossible to think of anything if we do not think of one thing; but if this is possible, one name might be assigned to this thing."

So in our example, Greeks are Greeks, and Greeks are not the same thing as non-Greeks. Why would you even use a name if this was not implied in your usage? The whole point of names is that they narrow down the common perceptual field so that you can pick out a particular piece of reality. 

Law Two: The Law of Non-Contradiction

And if the same name does not apply to the same piece of reality in the same respect at the same time, there is no point in using a name at all:

"One cannot say of something that it is and that it is not in the same respect and at the same time."

You cannot say that Nikki is both Greek and non-Greek. If there is an ambiguity in your usage of the name (say Greek ancestry vs Greek citizenship), then you need to iron out that ambiguity, but you cannot just violate the law of noncontradiction on a whim. You've met people who refuse to respect this law, and I'm sure you could tell me—that they are impossible to have a conversation with. In talking to them, you may have had some sympathy with a saying of the Arab philosopher Ibn Sina in his Metaphysics:

"Anyone who denies the Law of Non-contradiction should be beaten and burned until he admits that to be beaten is not the same as not to be beaten, and to be burned is not the same as not to be burned."

Law Three: The Law of the Excluded Middle

"There are two kinds of people in the world—"

—not three. That's what we started with right? As soon as you give a thing its name, you divide the world into the two opposing camps of that and not-that. 

"But on the other hand there cannot be an intermediate between contradictories, but of one subject we must either affirm or deny any one predicate."

So there are Greeks, and everyone else who wish they was Greek. There is no middle term. there is no person in the universe who is not either "Greek" or "not-Greek". But what am I doing? In typical philosophical fashion, I have spilled so much ink in analysing the obvious that I have completely killed the joke. Because the sentence: 

"There are two kinds of people: Greeks, and everyone else who wish they was Greek" 

is not funny because it is respecting or violating the laws of thought, it is funny because it assumes that this is the best way of dividing up the world. Which it clearly isn't. Patently, transparently, obviously. This is part of why we delight in "there are two kinds of people" statements. Some of the fun is in appreciating a new distinction in the universe, but most of the fun is in recognising that these binary distinctions are hopelessly inadequate to reality. It slaps us in the face with the inadequacy of names, and for some reason that's funny. I suppose because we spend most of our day taking names so very seriously. Like all good comedy, it brings out the absurdity of the everyday. But there is a time when it stops being funny:

"There are two kinds of people: Aryans, and everyone else who wish they was Aryans".

That sentence isn't funny at all. Why? Because we know there are people who really do think that this is the best way of dividing up the world. In fact we know a historical figure who followed this sentence—this regime of names—to its absolute logical conclusion. And it wasn't funny. It wasn't funny at all.

Excursus on Some Curious Facts 

Here are some curious facts.

First Curious Fact

There was a ritual in ancient Vedic Hinduism known as brahmodya, which translates literally as "to be spoken about brahaman". Brahaman is the Hindu analogue to the Abrahamic God: The transcendent essence and immanent fundament of all of reality—although unlike the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, Brahaman is not conceived in personal terms. Brahmodya was a sort of Riddlers' Duel in which the two contestants would challenge each other to find a verbal formula that comprehended the essence of Brahaman. As each contestant responded to the formula of his opponent in more rarefied, esoteric, and finely drawn terms, the contest gradually slipped beyond the comprehension of the audience, until at last one of the contestants was shocked into silence. The essential transcendence and fundamental immanence of Brahaman was confirmed through the inadequacy of language to fully comprehend it. The ultimate point of "to be spoken about brahaman" was that brahaman is not to be spoken about.

Second Curious Fact

Late in the summer of 1777, Benedict Arnold was in a terrible jam. He had been sent to relieve the siege of Fort Stanwix, a wilderness stronghold besieged by eight hundred Tories and British regulars and one thousand Iroquois warriors under the command Barry St. Leger. Setting off with only a handful of Continental professionals, he had expected to pick up over a thousand militiamen in dribs and drabs as he travelled through the bush country of the Mohawk River Valley—but Iroquois warriors do not lay out a bed of astroturf and roses in the event of woods fighting, and Arnold found only a hundred-odd men willing to take up arms against such formidable foes. He had only one piece of luck. Some of his troops broke up a Tory meeting at an isolated settlement, and captured a curious fellow by the name of Hon Yost Schuyler. 

Hon Yost was European by descent, but his family found Mohawk company more congenial than that of their fellow colonists, and Hon Yost had achieved a certain notoriety among the Mohawk and Iroquois tribes of the area. You see, Hon Yost was insane—possibly schizophrenic but nobody really knows—given to visions and prophesying in tongues. This was taken as a sign of sanctity among the local tribes, and Hon Yost was believed to prophesy under the influence of the Great Spirit. So when Hon Yost's mother and brother came to plead for his life, Benedict Arnold had a crazy idea. A wonderful, awful, no-good super-crazy very-nuts idea.

 He took Hon Yost's brother Nicholas hostage, and told Hon Yost that if the Iroquois besieging Stanwix did not lift the siege, he would not be seeing his brother again. Hon Yost was mad, not stupid or cruel (few crazy people, are as it happens) so he put a few bullet holes through his own clothing and duly set out for Fort Stanwix. When he arrived, he told a wild tale of skin-teeth escape from a horde of slavering Patriots. Asked to estimate the number of the enemy, he swept his hands towards the leaves of the trees. After a few more scouts came in reporting on the disturbances Arnold was causing to inflate the perception of his numbers, the Iroquois began to slip away, first in a trickle, then in a flood. St. Leger was forced to raise the siege, and as his regulars retreated towards the river, their former allies began to track, harry and kill them. Their numbers were much reduced by the time they were fully fled, and Arnold had not lost a man. 

As it happens, this is not a peculiar story. It's a frequently remarked upon fact in contemporary religious studies that in an enormous range of pre-modern cultures, abnormality begets sanctity; the technical term is "liminality". Liminal figures are people who break up or transgress certain categories in their actions or persons. In the cultures under discussion, this is taken as the sign of a special proximity to the divine. So for instance, people with non-typical mental states that would probably be diagnosed as bipolar or schizophrenic are destined for a shamanic career in many African, Amazonian, and Inuit societies. Gender ambiguous individuals are likewise considered sacred in parts of Native North America, Polynesia, and the Subcontinent. The ascetic austerities and eccentricities of Egyptian and Syriac saints in the Greek Orthodox tradition put them in a similar category. Even in Western Europe, the figure of the "holy fool" was not extinguished till the coming of Modernity. The common theme linking these individuals seems to be their resistance to naming. They are, in the words of a Vedic formula for brahaman: "Not this—not that".    

Third Curious Fact

In the first centuries of Christianity, perhaps the most common charge levelled at Christians by their respectable Roman accusers was the charge of atheism and impiety. Consider this account of the 2nd century martyrdom of Polycarp:

"Therefore, when he was brought before him, the proconsul asked if he were Polycarp. And when he confessed that he was, the proconsul tried to persuade him to recant saying, 'Have respect for your age,' and other such things as they are accustomed to say: 'Swear by the Genius of Caesar; repent, say, 'Away with the atheists!' So Polycarp solemnly looked at the whole crowd of lawless heathen who were in the stadium, motioned toward them with his hand, and then (groaning as he looked up to heaven) said, ‘Away with the atheists!'"

What horrified the Romans more than anything was the Christian rejection of the traditional gods of their fathers, and their denial that the gods of everybody else were truly gods—(as I covered in an earlier post, Christians didn't think the pagan gods weren't real, they thought they were demons). The Romans encouraged religious diversity in their empire—not because they were pluralists, but because they assumed everyone had good reasons for worshipping as they did, and they didn't want to piss off any gods they weren't aware of. They were willing to put up with Judaism largely because of its aura of great antiquity, and because the Jews did not actively evangelize. But the Christians, who introduced a totally novel religion, refused to sacrifice to the traditional gods, and insisted that that religious practices of the whole empire needed to be dismantled, were dangerous enemies to the prosperity of the state. The history of the empire after the triumph of Constantine seems to argue that they may have been right.

Fourth Curious Fact

As long as I've introduced Umberto Eco, I may as well mention that he wrote another interesting book called The Search for the Perfect Language, which tells the story of a peculiar obsession of the Early Modern world. Beginning in the 16th century, a huge swathe of the European Intellect became obsessed with recovering the Adamic language—the pre-Babel speech with which Adam named the animals. Jesuit missionaries sought it in Chinese Mandarin and French antiquarians in Egyptian hieroglyphs—for if one can speak the Adamic language, one possesses the names which capture the essence of the things they signify. 

The Adamic language was the key to the secrets of nature, power over the environment, success in war—even the ability to turn metal into gold. John Dee, the chief advisor to Queen Elizabeth and the most voluminous scholar of his day, despairing of the power of his experimental inquiries  to bring him closer to this language, consulted the spirit medium Edward Kelley. Together, they held conferences over a crystal ball, in which the angelic spirits they contacted dictated the Adamic language—still spoken in the spirit world above—into a series of books. According to John Dee, the biblical figure Enoch was the last to have spoken this language on earth, so the language has come to be called Enochian. You can still pick up a lexicon in any New Age bookstore, and even in the odd Barnes and Noble—complete with summoning rituals. Unfortunately, the angels eventually told Edward Kelley that John Dee needed to share his wife with Kelley, and Dee died disgraced, penniless, and possibly insane. 

A century later, Leibniz was looking for the same thing. He wanted a universal language that would mend the bridges of a Europe shattered by religious conflict. But he did not bother with hieroglyphs or spirit-summoning, he tried to create it through a priori reasoning—a synthetic, quasi-mathematical perfect language. It didn't work out in the end, but his previous efforts didn't hurt when he was formulating the calculus. The accumulated by-blows of the European questers after perfect languages and power over nature—Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton—started to add up. When the time came to start applying mathematics to the systematic observation of natural phenomena, Europe was ready. 

And whaddya know? Power over nature was the result. Two centuries after Leibniz, Bertrand Russell took up the torch of creating a perfectly logical and self consistent order of expression. Together with Alfred North Whitehead, he produced the Principia Mathematica. Unfortunately, a few years later, Kurt Godel came along and pissed in the broth with his Incompleteness Theorem, which states that no axiomatic logical system can do without an unstated number of axioms which are true but unprovable within the system. So much for a chaste and perfect language. But then, computers—which run on a direct descendant of the symbolic logic Russell and Whitehead created—are also pretty cool, I guess.

When Did Names Become So Imprisoning? 

Where were we before our unrelated excursus? Oh right, we were wondering, why did the social protest movements of the 60s and 70s focus on names, on labels, as being so imprisoning? Why does the contemporary singer Elly Jackson feel the need to assert: "I don't have a sexuality." She's certainly correct in at least one sense. Athenian, Roman, or Edo society never felt the need to differentiate between homosexuals and everyone else. A certain level of homosexual activity was expected and assumed, but no one ever felt the need to sort their contemporaries into the neat, exact, and wholly self-consistent categories of "sexuality". Why do we? 

Here is my best guess. When you survey the course of Western history in the long view, two characteristic civilisational theses become apparent. These theses are present in all societies to varying degrees; they are not a unique property of the West. Nor have they been regnant throughout the course of Western history. But at least in the last five hundred years, they have achieved an unprecedented dominance in the life of the Western World.

Thesis One: The Uniformity of Truth

Today, an overwhelming majority of Western people take it for granted that there must be One True Path, a sentiment best expressed in the phrase: "which religion is true?" Celebratheist Richard Dawkins seems to feel confident in asserting that religious people are already atheists qua everybody else's gods. All he is asking believers to do is to rid themselves of one last deity: their own. But this seems to be confounded by the experience of a Mormon missionary in an Australian Hindu community. After telling a Hindu family in detail about Jesus, he was gladly assured that everyone had been converted, and thanked beautifully for his efforts. Questioned about the timeline for getting rid of their heathen idols and pagan practices, he was met with confusion: The families had no intention of kicking the old gods to the curb; they had just been glad to learn about the existence of another avatar of the divine. As Ghandi might have said: "I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians".

The early Christians were accused of being atheists for a reason. The idea that a transcendent God and a unique revelation necessitated the complete destruction of all existing religious practices was totally new and highly disruptive. The Christian Empire of Constantine and Eusebius was marked by an unprecedented new phenomenon: violent doctrinal controversy. Monks rioted and patriarchs were murdered for the sake of establishing the unbegotten status of Christ at the Council of Nicaea (325 CE) and the unmixed hypostatic union of His Divine and human natures at the Council of Chalcedon (451 CE). The Monophysite provinces of Egypt and Syria seemed perfectly happy to accept Arab rule as members of the dhimmi ("people of an earlier revelation") rather than subject themselves to the "Nestorian" patriarch in Constantinople—who severed the Divine and the human in the person of Christ and thus denied his communicants salvation. 

Interrupted by the exigencies of survival after the fall of the Western Empire, this thesis has only expanded in the subsequent history of the West. There has been little room for the Buddhist notion of heterogenous but equally saving upayas (paths to nibbana). The climax of this thesis on the religious plane was the Wars of Religion, which followed on the heels of the Protestant Reformation. Even the tiniest sect felt entitled to damn all other peoples in Europe to the fires of hell, and to feed the flames of their own agenda with the bellows of war. 

After all, there are only two kinds of people: the Elect and the Damned. If you are one of the Elect, you are not one of the Damned. You cannot be both Elected and Damned. Moreover, there is no such thing as a person neither Elected nor Damned: You are one or you are the other. And since salvation is an infinite good and damnation an infinite evil, and being saved is contingent on adhering precisely to the correct verbal formulation of the One True Faith, all measures are necessarily justified in bringing people into the fold of Election. If you are willing to accept the core premise—The Uniformity of Truth—it is hard to argue with the conclusions.

This thesis proved itself very useful in the creation of modern science. An anal-retentive obsession with absolute and uniform self-consistency is exactly what you need when you are using mathematical notation and experimental verification to create a unified apparatus of prediction and control. As Pope Innocent III extirpated the heretical Cathars and Waldensians from the body of Christendom with fire and blood, so modern scientists purge their theories of outliers and opacities the white hot iron of falsification. By the end of the 17th century the West had more or less abandoned religious uniformity and universal adherence to the One True Faith. But it replaced it with something just as exciting: the search for the Laws of Nature, or in more modern language: ToE "Theory of Everything". This remains the holy grail of contemporary particle physics, a monolithic and wholly self-consistent account that can exhaust Reality Itself. 

(Although even in science, the Uniformity of Truth has experienced some bumps in recent years. The Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics was awkward: Schrodinger's cat is insufferably indifferent to the heavy-browed imperatives of Aristotelian logical necessity. And Stephen Hawking, contra his early hopes in A Brief History of Time, has now renounced the horizon of ToE. He thinks Godel's theorem makes it impossible.) 

Note: I hasten to add that I have supplied only the most extreme interpretation of what a theoretical ToE would supply; there are other, much more limited claims for what such a theory would provide that are just as popular on the contemporary market of ideas.

Thesis Two: The Adequacy of Language

It is difficult to think of any Reformation theologian having much sympathy with the ritual of brahmodya. The articulators of Lutheranism and Calvinism were fired with the dream of a Systematic Theology, a cathedral-like edifice of dogma that would perfectly encapsulate the mysteries of salvation. In Paul and Origen, the statement that Christ died as a ransom for our sins is one metaphor among many for describing the saving work that Christ accomplished. In the Reformation theologians, it is the basis for the "Forensic Theory of Justification", whereby Christ suffered the penalty incurred by Adam as a substitute for all Adam's descendants, and allowed His merit to be attributed as righteousness to all those who had faith. Atonement thus becomes a carefully regulated transaction, conducted according to strict rules, a procedure which might satisfy the protocolar requirements of the most exacting Early Modern courtroom.  

Reformation Europe was swamped with creeds and catechisms, Protestant and Catholic, all claiming to give a precise and pure account of the true nature of God and the path to salvation within the space of a few short pages or propositions. There was no room in this new Europe for negative theology, (the Abrahamic tradition that affirms God's transcendence by successively affirming and then denying one divine predicate after another—ending in silence). Nor was there room for the allegorical methods of scripture interpretation that dominated the Medieval world, which saw many layers of meaning in the biblical text, and did not always take it as a literal and factual account. No, in the new Europe, the "plain sense of scripture" ruled the day. Biblical literalism was ascendent, and for the first time, Genesis was assumed to give a strictly factual account of the origin of the life, the universe, and everything. The date of creation could now be calculated to the minute.   

What was truly ascendent, it would seem, is the thesis of the Adequacy of Language. Even after the dreams of the Reformers were elbowed out by the dreams of the philosophes, this thesis continued to set the agenda. Consider the Search for the Perfect Language. The assumption that makes this beautiful dream possible is the belief that Truth is univocal, that the ivory breasted Mistress of Verisimilitude speaks with only one voice—high and sweet and clear—the faith that, as the philosopher John Searle once put it, there may be a language that is "isomorphic with reality". Somewhere out there, there is a map that is perfectly adequate to its territory. 

And boy does life get rough for those who wind up in the wrong place on the map—not to mention those who find themselves living in a supposedly excluded middle. The Early Modern period marks the beginning of a five century campaign against deviant elements, starting with the Early Modern witch craze (yes this is primarily an Early Modern phenomenon, not a medieval one). John Boswell, the most thorough historian of medieval homosexuality, claimed that the Roman Catholic church was not especially concerned to categorize or condemn homosexuality for most of the Middle Ages. There may have even been a ritual of same-sex union in the Roman and Greek Orthodox churches that allowed same-sex couples to quietly unite before God and affirm their common-law status (although I suspect there was normally a discreet silence about the prospect of sexual activity). This particular thesis is much contested, and sadly Boswell never got the opportunity to reply to many of his critics—after his premature death of AIDS. But in many circles, there is something close to consensus around his other thesis: that the elevation of homosexuality as the cardinal and most abominable sin began in the 13th century, and didn't truly hit its stride until the Early Modern period (Foucault placed the true crystallisation of the category of "homosexual" as late as the 19th century). 

Whatever the debates over particulars, what is clear, is that the Modern West is not a culture where abnormality or liminality is an occasion of sanctity. Mental illness has been carefully analysed, itemised, and filed away in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, whose sole purpose is to aid the noble cadre that seeks to return the wayward soul to the comforts of normality, functionality, and productivity. The modern mental facility is a curious place. Having many friends who ended up spending some time there, I am always struck by the way people eagerly bear and compare those curious yellow name badges within the whitewashed sanctum: "so what's your diagnosis?" Of course outside the facility, in the real world, the diagnosis is an object of shame, carefully hidden and diligently suppressed. "Nothing going on here officer, just a normal, functioning, non-crazy, non-homeless, productive individual over here officer." We have come a very long way from pillar saints, raving beguines, and holy fools. Hon Yost has no place here.  

And yet, even with the efforts of our best minds, the world keeps causing problems for our categories. The modern project of the nation state—with its admirable thesis that a single people speaking a single language and sharing a single culture should self-determine through the apparatus of a single government—keeps running into places that refuse to comply with its perfectly logical categories. 

We've done our level best to iron out the problems. When Greece and Turkey became separate nations, we did the logical thing and moved all the Greeks out of Turkey and all the Turks out of Greece.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_exchange_between_Greece_and_Turkey

When the British abandoned their empire in the Subcontinent, they quite logically partitioned it between Muslim Pakistan and Hindu India. The subsequent transfer of Muslims out of India and Hindus out of Pakistan caused a little unpleasantness, but what are a few hundred thousand deaths when strictness of line is at stake?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partition_of_India

The Communists, for their part, have been equally committed to the Adequacy of Language. Lenin combed diligently through the Russian populace in search of Reactionaries, Tsarists, and Bourgeoisie. Once Marx had done the hard work of discovering the categories of class already existing out there in the world, Lenin took the logical next step of stamping "class origins" on the pass papers of every citizen—just so we all know who is who and what is what. Stalin extended the project to rooting out undesirable elements like kulaks, class enemies in the countryside—"village bourgeoisie"—who trod down the agrarian proletariat. He was very successful, (I mean what's a few million famine deaths here or there, when straightness of line and political purity is at stake?) 

Although identifying "class enemies" sometimes proved difficult, even for Stalin. There is a curiously plaintive scribble in his own notes from the height of the dekulakization campaign. It reads: "What does kulak mean?"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulaks

Alas, we continue to have problems. The difficulties are not confined to the first half of the 20th century. In 1994, the Hutu Power party in Rwanda incited a sudden and massive campaign of genocide against the Tutu minority that left a million people dead. Although most Western media painted it as an atavistic upsurge of ancient, premodern tribal rivalries, they neglected to mention that the major work of categorisation and segregation had been done by Belgian colonialists in the first part of the 20th century, who employed a literalist reading of Genesis to neatly distinguish between the "Hamitic" Tutsis (sons of the Biblical Ham) and the "negroid" Hutus. It proved a nicely effective way of governing the colony, as the minority of "superior" Tutsis was set above the majority of "inferior" Hutus, and the mutual tension kept the subaltern groups focused on skirmishing with each other, not revolting against their "Japhetite" colonial overlords. 

Concluding on a Sparrow

It seems to me that the postmodern revolt has come largely from people who feel they've gotten a bad deal out of the The Uniformity of Truth and the Adequacy of Language. People like Jacques Derrida, who was born in French Algeria, one of the ugliest "civilising missions" of the 20th century. People like Michel Foucault, a homosexual, the "category" that has suffered most from the Modern distaste for liminality (with the notable exception of transvestite or transgender individuals). Even people like the novelist Zadie Smith, whose book White Teeth is about modern immigrants from the former British Raj living in London. They find themselves in a curious place, neither Pakistani nor English, "not this—not that".   

I think about my fiancee, who is considering going into endangered language revitalisation. People laugh at her when she tells them. I mean, why would you do that? Isn't it better to let things take their course, and eventually wake up one day in a world where everyone speaks English? Doesn't that make international cooperation and scientific exploration much more efficient? Sure. Yeah. I guess. I mean it would be simpler in a way.

But then, also, no. Really no. 

I guess the thing is—I guess the nice thing about names is not just that they name things, but that they are never really adequate to the things they name. There is always more to it than that. I like that idea. It makes life seem big and broad instead of cramped and cruel. I like knowing that there are seven thousand different words for bird (well there are a lot more than that because there are seven thousand odd languages in the world and each of them has lots of words for bird). 

What terrible strength is there in a sparrow, that it can bear the weight of more than seven thousand names? And even then, when you actually see a sparrow, up close and in person, it's just—it's just—well there's no name for that. There never will be. 

I like the feeling I get when I think a thought like that. Of course I would never have thought the thought or felt the feeling, if I hadn't named the sparrow in the first place. 

"And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time" - T.S. Eliot